To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. When actualized by myriad things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away.

-Dōgen, “Genjōkōan”

I start my Yoginis by gathering scraps and piling them on small stools. Eventually, I lay them out on the floor, designating the key bodily nodes. Like embryonic stem cells, elements differentiate into the limbs, joints, and organs of the growing figure.

The scraps are pieces of wooden toys, furniture, and German-style, figurative nutcrackers made in China. At once handpainted, ancestral totems and symbols of excess consumption, dolls and creepy old men, nutcrackers like these are ubiquitous in the U.S. I have dismembered my family’s collection and others sourced from craigslist.

Using wooden dowels to connect the fragments, I construct seated figures based on poses from Asian sacred art. The Yoginis in my 2022 show Eminem Buddhism were based on images of ferocious Hindu goddesses: icons of Chamunda, the yoginis, and Shaivite saint Karaikkal Ammaiyar. In the yogini temples of medieval India, dozens of icons with aged and youthful bodies represent the multifaceted nature of Shakti, the great goddess who personifies energy in all its forms.

Inspired by the cumulative effect of this proliferation, I continued producing Yoginis.

Around no. 20, I started meditating at a Zen center, driven by a mix of curiosity and need. This new experience is reflected in the orthoprax meditation poses of several of the new figures. Yogini no. 26 sits in full lotus with the plaid kilt of a giant nutcracker for its zafu, or meditation cushion. Its hands form the cosmic mudra. Pinocchio heads punctuate the spine like chakras. Yogini no. 25 sits in the Burmese position, its zafu a nutcracker’s jeweled and feathered bearskin cap. These ceremonial hats were widely adopted by European armies in the eighteenth century, apparently because they made the soldiers seem bigger. Bright red legs and pelvis impart a solidity to the lower body: a strong foundation for meditation. The upper body is dematerialized–only the breasts hover as if on stilts. Yogini no. 27 sits in half lotus on another bearskin zafu. A Frankenstein head with a soldier’s cap tops the spine.

The military elements contradict the orthoprax purity of these poses. Like me, these figures are demon devotees: blood-soaked, monstrous converts. Even no. 26, perched primly on its tartan zafu, is delicately constructed to the point of overwrought brittleness, the impassive face undermined by a mendacious core of long-nosed, grinning Pinocchio heads.

Several other new Yoginis sit in royal ease, a pose associated with the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara in their Chinese manifestation as Guanyin. In Yogini no. 30, one leg hangs freely, while the other leg is bent, an elbow resting upon the knee. The other arm is planted on the seat, supporting a relaxed torso. The breasts are bunches of wooden grapes; an Uncle Sam top hat locates the head. Originally male, Guanyin can assume any form to guide a given individual to enlightenment; in some manifestations they thus appear as a woman or indeed as a female prostitute. While feminized depictions of Guanyin are usually without breasts, the grapes in no. 30 resonate viscerally with the anatomical structures of the female breast: the milk-producing lobules familiar to anyone who has performed a self-examination.

The stool in no. 30 is a taller version of a cow stool–complete with udders–that I used for Yogini no. 12. On one level a nod to the vehicles, often animals, common in Indian icons, when combined with the Uncle Sam hat it produces a string of jarring associations–American (Texan?), white, bellicose, patriarchal. Royal ease registers as relaxed dominance.

Yogini no. 23 lounges in royal ease on a tall orange stool. Its body is made from pieces of a brass-painted headboard. The breasts rise directly from the pelvis to occupy a blank space below the curve of the shoulders. Buddhist women in late imperial China used artforms including dance, adornment, and hair embroidery to connect with the feminized bodhisattva of compassion. Drawing the deity was a form of devotion in itself and a way of making merit. Discussing a drawing by Fang Weiyi, a Qing Dynasty artist and devout widow, Yuhang Li explains that while the “delineation of the figure represents Guanyin’s meditative body… the interior void of the figure signifies the state of mind.”

In its clunky-elegant way, no. 23 also tries to delineate the void of the meditator’s mind using Guanyin’s emptied form. I suppose I too am trying to make merit, since I certainly can’t empty my own mind. There is a seventeenth century Japanese monk named Enku who is renowned for having made 120,000 Buddhas. It is said that to accomplish this feat of merit he made ten Buddhas per day! He also walked all over Japan. For a while I convinced myself that he would therefore have had no time to meditate, using this presumption to excuse my lack of resolve. After a few months I found I really needed to sit. Humbled, I have returned to practice.

Looking at the Yoginis as a group, there is a continuum between the fragmentary or simplified and the complete or elaborate. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Yogini no. 17 and no. 18. First I made no. 17, the more complete one. Having an identical chair, in no. 18 I recreated an earlier, simpler stage. Some of Enku’s buddhas, the koppa-butsu or “chip buddhas” are “practically sticks with a smile.” On the other hand, the tenth-century Seiryōji Buddha, brought from China to Japan, has a cavity containing a full set of inner organs made of silk. To me, both approaches are compelling: the minimalist approach, where “body and mind drop away,” and the completist approach, which honors the complexity of embodied experience.

Composed of recognizably disparate elements, these figures are in a literal sense “actualized by myriad things.” Pieces like the wooden grapes simultaneously read as body parts and maintain their identities as fragments, embodying the non-duality of the mundane and transmundane. If the nutcrackers I use are devalued kitsch, they are also loci of myriad relationships between beings: made of the body parts of trees, they are hand-painted by factory workers. Destined for late capitalist festive life, they quickly become charged ancestral heirlooms. I like to imagine that by dismembering them, I free them from some of this karma. Refashioned into spacious, divine bodies, the resulting personal icons are indices of my dialog with the dharma.

Footnotes

(1) Padma Kaimal, Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis, (Association for Asian Studies, 2012).
(2) “In India and elsewhere in Asia, local deities and demons are sometimes converted by the mainstream traditions. The defeated ‘demon devotees’ become guardians for major gods, sometimes after being killed and reborn.” Elizabeth Englander, Wisdom Kings, 2022.
(3) Yuhang Li, Becoming Guanyin: Artistic Devotion of Buddhist Women in Late Imperial China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020), 103.
(4) Li, Becoming Guanyin, 101.
(5) Enkū, Julian Daizan Skinner, Sumiko Hayashi, Alex Kofuu Reinke Horikitsune, In Heaven’s River: Poems and Carvings of Mountain-Monk Enku, (Zenways Press, 2015), 12.
(6) Gregory Henderson and Leon Hurvitz, “The Buddha of Seiryōji: New Finds and New Theory,” Artibus Asiae 19, no. 1 (1956), 22.
(7) This is a new footnote

Installation
views

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Works

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.17, 2022
Wood and paint
46 x 26 x 24 inches
116.8 x 66 x 35.6 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.18, 2022
Wood and paint
43 x 28 x 12 inches
109.2 x 71.1 x 30.5 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.19, 2022
Wood and paint
45 x 25 x 13 inches
114.3 x 63.5 x 33 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.20, 2022
Wood, paint and fake fur
41 x 15 x 12 inches
104.1 x 38.1 x 30.5 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.22, 2023
Wood, paint and fake fur
38 x 33 x 13 inches
96.5 x 83.8 x 33 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.23, 2023
Wood and paint
56 x 26 x 20 inches
142.2 x 66 x 50.8 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.24, 2023
Wood, paint and felt
42 x 25 x 21 inches
106.7 x 63.5 x 53.3 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.25, 2023
Wood, paint, fake fur, plastic and feather
23 x 16 x 11 inches
58.4 x 40.6 x 27.9 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.26, 2022
Wood, paint and fake fur
37 x 31 x 10 inches
58.4 x 40.6 x 27.9 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.27, 2023
Wood, paint, fake fur, fabric, plastic and feathers
32 x 25 x 14 inches
81.3 x 63.5 x 35.6 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.29, 2023
Wood, paint, fake fur and yarn
61 x 27 x 15 inches
154.9 x 68.6 x 38.1 cm

House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2
House of Gaga ❧ Eminem Buddhism Vol 2

Elizabeth Englander
Yogini No.30, 2023
Wood, paint and yarn
32 x 25 x 14 inches
81.3 x 63.5 x 35.6 cm